User blog:Ace1580/The Problem of Pornography - 2
'Preface' This is the second part of the first weeks lesson. In it we delve into the framework of what lust is, why purity is so important from a spiritual perspective, and why it's wrong. The following 3 lessons will be practical, but I feel it's essential to build this foundation first. Each week's lesson will build on each other, and the beginning of each will have some of my story that will contribute to the theme of the lesson. 'Some of my Story' I was raised Christian. My parent's taught me and my sister the difference between what was right and what was wrong, but for many things, I knew. No one had to tell me that hitting my sister was wrong, or stealing cookies, or lying about stealing those cookies. I don't actually remember the first time I was exposed to pornography but I know it wasn't intentional and i wasn't looking for it. I suspect that this is actually pretty common. We go about our daily lives and catch a glimpse of something when a serpent says "Hey! Did you happen to notice this?" This being an apple on a tree, or a magazine at a friend’s house, or a pop-up on an otherwise innocent website. I also know that I instantly knew it was wrong, and i didn't need my parents to tell me that. You catch a glimpse of something and then immediately turn away. Yet that thing you caught a glimpse of doesn't just immediately go away in your mind. There's a reason the Bible says "among you there must not be even a''' '''hint of sexual immorality" (Eph 5:3). But more on that later. It also not an immediate thing. You don't look at pornography once and suddenly become addicted. Yet that first exposure, despite knowing instantly it's wrong, something (we call it curiosity, but fallen nature and temptation are probably more to blame) makes us want to look again. Even though you tried that cigarette once and decided it was disgusting, something makes you want to try another one, and you can't really explain what. I let myself have another look somewhere down the road, and that turned into another look. It wasn't long before pornography was a habit, yet it grew up so slowly that I couldn't even recognize it. All the while I knew what I was doing was wrong, and all the while I was justifying it. I would think to myself "I’m not really as bad as people who are really into pornography. I only look at it every now and then (which was becoming increasingly more often)!" So I always compared myself with people who were worse than me, and no matter how far down I went, I could always find someone worse. This shouldn't sound unfamiliar; take a look at what Adam does when God asks him if he ate of the tree. He brought his wife into it and tried to defer blame and find some way of justifying his actions. Either way, it’s pretty clear that Adam knew he was wrong, and he was desperately trying to get out of this one. Make no mistake, this decent into deeper levels of sin, followed by rationalization is a brilliant trap by the enemy. Before you know it, you’re just as bad, or worse, as people you’ve always condemned (and probably still do!) and you have no idea how you got there. And that’s what happened to me, and the truth is that all the while I was fully aware of the fact that it was wrong. 'God, Holiness, and Lust' So what is it that makes lust (and by extension pornography) wrong and why are we seemingly aware of how wrong it is, even though we don’t always know what it is, and speaking of that, what is lust anyway? It’s not exactly an easy question. Many young people, myself included have found themselves looking at someone of the opposite sex and wondering, “Am I lusting right now?” How are you supposed to know if you’re crossing that line into sin? I heard someone give me a catchy rule of thumb for lust once. They said “Look, linger: lust” as in, if you look at someone of the opposite sex, and you linger on them, you’re lusting. It sounds good and it’s an easy guideline to go by, but I really don’t like that definition. When you define lust as looking at the opposite sex for an arbitrary amount of time, all you’re really doing is opening yourself up for a whole lot of guilt, which plays right into the enemy’s plan anyway. If you are sinning just by looking at a member of the opposite sex and finding them attractive, then frankly, we’re all either blind, or doomed. The problem is that this is a common conception among Christians; you must not even have a hint of sexual immorality after all! But the Bible doesn’t say that you can’t look at someone of the opposite sex without sinning, so let’s dispel that rumor right away. In fact, it doesn’t say a thing about how long you can take a glance! 'Lust as Idolatry' The Bible often says that lust (and any sort of sexual immorality) is wrong, but it doesn’t do much in defining what it is. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, says that to look at a woman lustfully, is to commit adultery with her in your heart. In the Old Testament, adultery is right up there with murder and stealing in the Ten Commandments. This tells us that purity is exceedingly important to God, but it doesn’t really seem to clarify what lust entails. Or does it? Elsewhere in the New Testament, you’ll find Colossians 3:5, which reads “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.” Now we’re starting to get somewhere with our understanding of lust. The Bible calls it idolatry and this helps us understand what we do to lust, and why God is so opposed to it. Why does knowing that lust is idolatry help us understand what specifically constitutes lust? Allow me to elaborate. Idolatry has a couple of components. Most obviously we commit idolatry when we put something before God. We find ourselves worshiping the creation, rather than the creator. How this ties into lust should become immediately obvious. When we engage in lust, what we’re doing is worshiping the thing that’s beautiful rather than worshiping the God that made it that way. The funny thing about that, is that worshiping that beauty isn’t giving recognition to God, it’s simply feeding our own desires, and is ultimately selfishness. It's important to recognize this because it gives us a tangible way of answering the question of "Am I lusting right now?" We can examine our hearts to understand what we're worshiping, and be able to say conclusively, yes or no. It also means that we can look at a member of the opposite sex and appreciate their beauty as God created them without lusting! But there’s more to idolatry and it’s other layers are a little more complicated to explain. In the Old Testament times, pagan nations routinely made idols to represent their gods, a practice expressly forbidden by the God of Israel. God didn’t even allow people to make an idol representing Him! Why not? We find the answer in some of the deeper impetus of those pagan nations. When people were struck by things they didn’t understand, like famine, disease, or natural disasters, they attributed it to some divine force. These divine forces were capricious. Some years you would have good weather and a good crop, and other times you would have drought and suffering. As such, the gods had to be appeased, and people made idols representing the gods in order to facilitate a physical way of doing this: people made sacrifices and worshiped them. In reality, people had put their gods into a box. By having an idol, people had a way of manipulating their gods through one means or another and therefore sense of control over the them so as to have good harvests, and successful wars. Idolatry, in this case, is about stripping the gods of their power, so that the people may impose their ideas of how the gods should operate and thereby bend them to meeting their needs and desires. Is it any wonder why God forbade making idols, even of Him? The Israelites were never to be given the idea that they had mastery over the Master of the universe. So what does that have to do with lust? When we lust, we are stripping people of the opposite sex of their personhood (at least in our minds, remember, idolatry didn’t actually give people power over the gods, just a sense of power in their understanding) in order to meet our own desires. We have selfishly degraded a person that God beautifully created, into an aesthetically pleasing collection of parts that happen to fulfill our fleshly desires. Now we are in control. So with our new understanding of idolatry I think we can come to a generally agreeable definition on lust. Lust is when we worship our fleshly desires and creation, rather than creator, by using anything singularly for how it can meet our needs, and discarding the rest. (As an aside, notice that this definition does not include anything sexual in it. We can lust after just about anything. This lesson doesn't just apply to people who are struggling with lust in a sexual manner, but applies to people who are chasing after anything for how it pleases them.) Think about how this applies to pornography. Culture doesn’t really consider people in pornography as people, they’re objects, and we have no concern for anything else about them except for how they make us feel. Even with things like romance novels, where we aren’t even dealing with real people, a form of the same concept applies. You are worshiping your flesh by removing anything resembling a person from the equation, and you’re left with only what you find sexually appealing. What a self-centered practice! In a relationship, there is mutual love, mutual desire, and a concern and caring for the other person. In lust, there is only us, and how we meet our needs (more on this later). Think also about how this applies to how we treat people we know and love. Lusting after someone who we deeply consider our brothers or sisters in Christ rarely feels natural or right. Present when we feel ourselves drifting into lust with someone we care deeply about is the nagging feeling that we need to fight that tendency. When we are posed with someone we love, we simply can't discard the rest of the person, as lust tend to do. When we lust, we are not really seeing people, we’re just seeing what it is about them that pleases us sexually and then we make that the center of our attention: we dehumanized them, and then worship what our minds have made of them. Notice that this definition doesn’t set any precedent about “lingering” on a person. You may see someone who you find attractive, be able to interact with them just fine without lusting. Alternatively, one glance at someone else may cause you to stumble. As such this isn’t about laying down a hard and fast rule and descending into legalism, it’s about the state of your heart. Do you have a heart that is loving people or one that is just allowing them to meet your needs? Do you care enough about people to fight the temptation to be selfish and to see them for how God sees them? 'Bringing it all together' This is why we find adultery, (and therefore, by Jesus’ definition, lust) in the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments give us a glimpse of the character of God and God, by his very nature, can’t see any part of you without seeing (and loving) all of you, mind, body, and spirit. He can't use you only for how you please him (if this was the case, do you think he would have sacrificed his son on the cross?). This actually answers our question of why lust is wrong. At the core, lust is wrong because it is contrary to the nature of God. The fact that it's contrary to his nature also answers the question of why we’re so acutely aware of how wrong it is: God is holy. He’s perfect, and uniform and pure throughout and though we sometimes do a horrible job of showing it, we are made in his image. What does this mean for us? It means that just like Adam, when we live contrary to the image in which we were created (that is, when we sin) we know it, we feel guilty, we try to hide. And we don’t need someone else to tell us that it's wrong, we just know (and if for some reason we try to rationalize it away, God gave us the Ten Commandments to tell us definitively anyway). I'm going to make a bold statement here. The whole point of being a Christian is that we are being transformed to be a better image bearer. To be a Christian is to submit to God and let him change you to match him; to look more like Christ. Lust, pornography, and sex outside of marriage are all centered on self, something that Christ was notably not. Sex, on the otherhand (true sex as God designed it) was made to be loving, giving, and sacrificial, all things that we are told to do in our emulation of Christ anyway. Does it come as any surprise that, as people who are being molded to bear the image of God, when we lust (or do anything that is contrary to that image) we feel guilt? On the other side of things, when we do live according to the image of God, things just move more smoothly, after all, we are built to work that way. There's something awfully cool in here though; in this idea that God is transforming us, and it helps further flesh out the answer of why lust is wrong. I'm going to borrow an example from the Old Testament in the form of consecration. 'Consecration, and God's plan for you' Consecration was the act of making something holy. In the Israelite way of worship in the Old Testament there were utensils that had been consecrated for use solely for making sacrifices in the Temple by the priests. These utensils were made holy, consecrated by specific rituals proscribed by God, and they were considered spiritually clean. Now these utensils weren’t used for any purpose other than working with sacrifices. If you were to use them with anything else, they would be made unholy, or unclean, by contact and then they couldn’t be used for making sacrifices anymore. Meanwhile, you would most certainly never use ordinary daily utensils to make sacrifices! Either scenario would render the sacrifice unfit for God’s purposes. And that’s what consecration means: setting something apart from the mundane by completely purifying it so that it can be used for God’s purpose. This should sound familiar. It's what God desires, and does for us as a part of our relationship with him. Being consecrated means being made ready for God’s plan for our lives by being conformed more and more to His image, and this image leaves no room for the worship of ourselves: for lust. This is why lust and purity is such a big deal in the big picture. This is why lust is wrong, why we know it's wrong, and why it's so important to live pure. This is the whole purpose behind this series! God has a plan for all of creation to be remade like it was before the fall of Adam, and you are an essential part of that plan. You are here to serve God's purposes on this earth, to be the utensil in the hands of a priest, to work together with your heavenly father to accomplish his goals. God chose you to be his partner in the grand scheme of redemption, and he needs you to be holy in order to be able to be an adequate helper. Fortunately, we don't have to worry about making it all on our own, "because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy." We've really only scratched the surface of the spiritual side of lust but this lesson builds us a good foundation. Over the rest of the series, we're going to tackle lust and pornography on a very practical, real life level. We're going to explore the Problem of Pornography: Why Pornography Presents Such a Struggle, The Lies of Pornography, and Hope for Deliverance. Part 2 Category:Blog posts